When you walk around bracing for impact, you’re dramatically decreasing your chances. Your chances to avoid the outcome you fear, your chances to make a difference, and your chances to breathe and connect.

The structure of the VC industry is changing. This matters not only to entrepreneurs raising capital — but it also impacts the finance industry overall, because companies are staying private longer (fewer IPOs) and public investors (including hedge funds, mutual funds, publicly held corporations) are getting into the VC game, too. So in that sense these changes affect everyone who is in the market.

The changing structure of the VC industry was a huge topic at the recent PreMoney conference — and the focus of a discussion between me and fellow venture capitalist Mark Suster, which you can watch here and here. Mark also just wrote an excellent post discussing the structural changes; I highly recommend you read it. To summarize, some of the key observations include: the rise of small funds (they now account for 67% of all new funds raised in 2014); the concentration of capital among fewer, larger…